Women Taking Back the Streets

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At one time the life of a flâneur seemed to me to be a noble goal, and the purest possible expression of personal freedom. Plus: there were all those cafés to be encountered en route, where one could pause to savour an espresso, while contemplating the many other pleasures of la vie bohème: poverty, drunkenness, insanity, literary fame. Laura Elkin felt much the same, but found opportunities in that particular career path to be limited by her gender, the flâneur usually seen as “a figure of masculine privilege and leisure, with time and money and no immediate responsibilities to claim his attention.” Hence Flâneuse (Chatto and Windus): the end result of Elkin’s frustration at this unfortunate state of affairs. Flâneuse is a contemporary, feminist take on themes explored by Walter Benjamin in his classic Arcades Project—and in other works of that ilk by writers like Ian Sinclair (London Orbital; Edge of the Orison), Will Self (Psychogeography) and Julien Gracq (The Shape of a City), as well as in films by directors such as Terence Davies (Of Time and the City) and Patrick Keiller (London; Robinson in Space). All of them men, you’ll note; the ones who (as Elkin puts it) “you read about in the Observer on weekends, … writing about each other’s work, creating a reified canon of masculine writer-walkers. As if a penis were a requisite walking appendage, like a cane.” In Flâneuse, Elkin interleaves autobiographical material—her own urban experiences and encounters in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London—with reconsiderations of the lives of other, more celebrated women in whose footsteps she treads: novelist Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin (aka George Sand), artist Sophie Calle, war correspondent Martha Gellhorn and filmmaker Agnès Varda. Students of flâneuserie take note: there is an extensive bibliography, and copious notes, but (alas) no index.